How to use wireframing templates in the design process?

Wireframing Templates and a Reuse Strategy

One of the most crucial parts of the design process, that’s usually concealed and undervalued, is… benchmarking. I haven’t met a single designer, who wouldn’t browse through dozens of competitors works, before designing an interface.

Studying someone else’s work is a standard practice in the UX industry. We’re looking for inspiration, best practices and solutions to our problems. There’s nothing wrong about that. We’re just trying to act quicker and avoid mistakes made by others. Call it extra precaution – and I’d agree.

I strongly believe the next step after watching someone’s work might also be really helpful. The next step is to reuse.

And I don’t mean copying. Plagiarism is a plague of our times and it shouldn’t have place in a design process of any self-respecting designer. Reuse means to use certain (usually general) patterns formed by someone else, get inspired by her/his solution to common problem and creatively adjust it to our project.

Smart reusing might be a winning design strategy.

“We’ve found that teams that build out a reuse strategy see tangible benefits. First, they can quickly kick off their design process by starting with a collection of work that is, at its most basic level anyway, already done and can be quickly pieced together into the beginnings of a working design. These teams are also more likely to complete a design in less time, even with all the nuances and details that make for a great user experience. Next, their designs are more likely to have a high degree of usability and behave consistently across the entire set of functionality despite their having devoted less time on the relatively unexciting support functionality. Finally, the teams iterate more quickly, giving them a chance to play with the design while it’s still malleable.”/ Spool, Jared; Robert Hoekman (2009-12-09). Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work (p. 7). Pearson Education (US). Kindle Edition.

I had a chance to attend Robert’s workshops back in 2011 and it was an absolutely top notch lesson of smart design strategy. Reusing what’s already done (internally and externally) helps designers focus on what’s important – forming and testing solution to specific problems of their users/customers.

Having that in mind we’re creating UXPorn – inspirational center of worth-watching UI elements that can be uploaded to UXPin account as a wireframe template.

Take a look at this short tutorial:

UXPorn repository is updated almost every day! Another repositories of great UI elements and solutions are on the way!